On 21 February 2011, one day after massive demonstrations took place in numerous cities across Morocco, young unemployed youth from the town of Khouribga, inspired by the events on Tahrir Square and the Moroccan 20 February Movement, set up an encampment in front of the local administration of the state-owned phosphate monopoly, Office Chérifien des Phosphates (OCP). They renamed the place ‘Maydan Attachghil’ (Employment Square) and occupied the place for almost a month (Choukralla 2011). In the meantime, young people in surrounding villages, such as Boulanouar, Hattane and Boujniba, also came out on the streets. In contrast to the political demands that were expressed by the 20 February protests denouncing continuing corruption, the lack of political freedom and socio-economic deprivation, the unemployed of Khouribga ‘simply’ demanded more jobs and expressed their explicit desire to be recruited by the OCP. In the early morning of 15 March, police forcibly broke up the camp. This triggered a violent clash between protesters and security forces. Several offices of the OCP were set on fire, together with dozens of cars. Officially, 120 people were injured and the damage amounted to 50 million dirham (approximately €5 million). The events of 15 March marked the beginning of a turbulent period in the mining region. In the following months, unemployed youth continued to protest on a regular basis in Khouribga, Youssoufia, Boujniba and other villages, trying to put pressure on OCP by, among other tactics, blocking the railways that transport phosphate to the port cities of Safi and Casablanca. In early July, the increased social tensions culminated again in three days of rioting. Security forces intervened with tear gas and water cannons. One month later, at the beginning of August, unemployed youth from Safi joined the protests by blocking the transport of phosphate from and to the local chemical processing company, Maroc Phosphore, a local branch of OCP.
These events, which hit Morocco's most strategic economic sector, quickly prompted OCP to launch OCP Skills, the largest recruitment programme in the modern history of Morocco (Azdi 2012). Yet, when it comes to understanding the level and impact of the recent region-wide uprisings in Morocco, particular cases such as Khouribga are usually left out of political analysis or at best considered as local symptoms on the margins – as if this kind of protest were only second to the civil democratic struggle of the 20 February Movement. The Moroccan protest scene after 2011 is usually depicted almost exclusively as a battle between the Moroccan monarchy and the 20 February Movement (e.g. Fernández Molina 2011; Maghraoui 2011; Desrues 2012). Nevertheless, the protests in the mining region of Khouribga were not an isolated event. Other struggles erupted elsewhere. For example, in Imider, a small municipality in the south-west of Morocco, local villagers have been involved since August 2011 in a two-year struggle over access to water. Furthermore, demonstrations took place – sometimes followed by clashes with security forces – in several towns across the country such as Laayoune, Taza, Tiznit, Bni Bouayach, Targuist etc. In these cases the struggle seemed to remain local and particularistic and had – at first sight – little or no direct relation to the 20 February Movement.
But why might it be so important to consider more particularistic struggles, such as those in Khouribga, as a starting point for analysis, rather than the seemingly universalist struggle of the 20 February Movement? First of all, because the struggle in Khouribga did not represent some kind of new beginning but rather the continuation of a phenomenon that has been going on for years, even decades. The events in the mining region between February and August 2011 can be situated and contextualised within a history of resistance against capitalist development in Morocco since the early 1980s. Moreover, we have seen a consistent increase in socio-economic protest in Morocco over the past decade, especially in smaller towns and villages such as Beni Taydi (where protests took place in 2001), Tamassint (in 2004), Al Hoceima (2005), Bouarfa (2006), Sefrou (2007), Sidi Ifni (2008), Beni Mellal (2009), Sidi Bouafif (2010) etc. (Zaki 2008; Bennafla and Emperador 2009; Guennoun 2010; Aziki 2011) (see Figure 1). This list is far from complete, and it is difficult to draw up an exhaustive inventory as many of these protests were spontaneous, short-lived and often neglected by the mainstream media. Other struggles, however, lasted for months, even years (e.g. Bouarfa and Sidi Ifni) (Bennafla and Emperador 2009).
Map showing the towns mentioned in this article where protests have broken out since 2000. Protests have also taken place elsewhere. (Cartography: Marieke Krijnen)
Second, although I do not wish to dismiss the relevant and meaningful contributions made by recent accounts of social protest in Morocco, I want to stress the importance of understanding the emergence of the civil democratic struggle of the 20 February Movement within a much broader and historical framework of continuous social mobilisation and contestation. Rosa Luxemburg highlighted the particular interrelation between socio-economic and civil democratic struggles in her analysis of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and argued that local particularistic expressions of resistance can easily transform into challenges on a broader political level, and vice versa, depending on the context, the opportunities and the possibilities for political action in the given situation of struggle. A contemporary reading of her work indicates that attempts to understand a phenomenon such as the Arab uprisings and its impact in any particular country cannot be limited to the ‘simple grand rising itself’, the ‘critical moment’, nor can it be solely ascribed to a mere regional context (or the so-called domino effect). Instead, we have to take into account the history of numerous and seemingly insignificant cases of local protest in the years leading up to that grand rising (Luxemburg 2005 [1906], 47).
Furthermore, drawing on Luxemburg, Maha Abdelrahman argued in the case of Egypt that the notion of a ‘hierarchy of struggles’ is problematic. The understanding of socio-economic protest as separate from ‘political’ protest and the assumption that these seemingly distinct aspects of the struggle might be ranked are, according to her, historically and theoretically without base and attest to a very narrow understanding of the political (Abdelrahman 2012, 615). Moreover, Abdelrahman points out that the accentuation of a schism between a political struggle for ‘freedom’ and an economic struggle for particular self-interests was central to the ruling elite's tactic of ‘reducing Egypt's revolutionary process to an “orderly transition to [liberal] democracy”’ (626). On the other hand, it is also a schism that can be produced by the practices and intentions of protesters themselves. By deliberatively stressing the apolitical, ‘purely’ economic demands of their political action, protesters, such as those in Khouribga, ironically contribute to liberal-ideal-type conceptualisations of what is ‘economic’ and what is ‘political’ struggle (Bogaert and Emperador 2011). Andrew Barry (1999) argues that public demonstrations should therefore be understood in a technical sense as much as in the political sense. Demonstrations, he argues, are not only a means to communicate and mobilise certain demands (collective or individual) but also a technology to produce certain knowledge or tell a certain narrative in public. In other words, the very act of demonstrating in front of OCP offices and targeting the company with slogans and specific demands transposes a particular public narrative or truth which then recycles itself through, for example, the media. In addition, the launching of OCP Skills, as an immediate reaction to the disturbances, adds to the perception that the protests are essentially only about jobs and not about the very real consequences of capitalist uneven development.
This account elaborates on both the continuity and the transformation of social protest in Morocco since the early 1980s. First of all, I briefly reconstruct the history of protest and situate it within a context of fundamental restructuring of class and state–society relations by neoliberal globalisation. The very nature of this restructuring makes it impossible to separate politics from economics (Hibou 2006) and, subsequently, to separate socio-economic from civil democratic protests. Second, I link the geography of social protest to the geography of capitalist uneven development of the last 30 years, both within large cities (Zemni and Bogaert 2011) and between large cities and peripheral towns and areas. In this regard, a contemporary neoliberal version is revealed of a division between a Maroc utile (useful Morocco) and a Maroc inutile (useless Morocco), a figurative image called into existence by the first Resident-General of the French Protectorate, Hubert Lyautey, which symbolised his political project. Finally, I return to the case of Khouribga and other local struggles to trace the interconnection between socio-economic and civil democratic protests as part of one and the same historical process of resistance and struggle. This account is not about small cities or local struggles as such, but about the story they tell about the political history of Morocco more generally, capitalist development and its resistance.
Free markets and food riots in Morocco
Protests in Morocco since the 1980s have to be situated within a broader context. From the late 1970s onwards, we see the emergence of ‘new waves’ of protest in the whole of Africa, and in the rest of the Global South, due to the fundamental restructuring of class and state–society relations by neoliberal globalisation (Seddon and Zeilig 2005). Since the beginning of the Third World debt crisis, socio-economic protests have coincided with political-economic programmes of ‘free-market reform’. Urban mass protests and riots during the 1980s were among the first expressions of popular discontent with the new neoliberal policies (Bayat 2002). In their book Free Markets and Food Riots, Walton and Seddon (1994, 3) argue that, despite the particular contexts and states in which these urban mass protests took place, these waves have to be seen as ‘a more general social and political response to the systematic undermining of previous economic and social structures and of an earlier moral order, in the name of “adjustment”’. The debt crisis and structural adjustment entailed a turning point which generated new economic and social contradictions that gave rise to new forms of popular revolt (176–177).
The urban riots of Casablanca in 1965 can be considered a solitary precursor of these ‘austerity protests’, one of which was severely repressed and prompted King Hassan II to dissolve parliament and install a five-year state of emergency (Clément 1992; Walton and Seddon 1994, 173). For more than a decade these kinds of riots appeared to be an isolated incident, not only in Morocco but in the whole region. Beyond repression, economic windfalls (notably a rise in the export prices for phosphate), foreign aid (including from Saudi Arabia) and international bank loans gave the monarchy leverage to develop and expand developmentalist policies in order to establish a more stable political equilibrium with the working classes, the emerging middle class and a growing group of educated youth in the cities (Glasser 1995; Richards and Waterbury 2008, 201–202, 243–248) – just as in other Maghreb countries, such as Algeria and Tunisia, public sector employment was one of the main government instruments to redistribute wealth in Morocco (Catusse and Destremau 2010). However, a sharp drop in exogenous revenues, combined with increasing public expenditures and the high cost of the occupation of the Western Sahara, resulted in a crushing debt by the end of the 1970s. Morocco turned to international donors, such as the IMF and the World Bank, which resulted in numerous debt-rescheduling interventions between 1980 and 1993 and the implementation of a Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) in 1983. During that decade the country was struck by several country-wide waves of protest, or ‘IMF riots’, which started in major cities such as Casablanca (in 1981), Marrakech (in 1984) and Fez (in 1990) and spread throughout the country (Clément 1992).
It is obvious that these riots were triggered by soaring prices, austerity and economic deprivation, but explanations should go beyond the rudimentary correlation between structural adjustment and austerity on the one hand and socio-economic deprivation and revolt on the other. In line with scholars such as E.P. Thompson (1971), Charles Tilly (1975) and also Barrington Moore (1978), Walton and Seddon (1994) emphasise that it was not so much impoverishment as such that lay at the basis of the mass revolts of the 1980s, but rather the sense of injustice and strong feelings of indignation that were provoked by the policies depriving the urban poor, the working classes and the growing middle class. Politically, the rollback of state-led provisions of collective welfare in the region marked the end of an era in which the legitimacy of the ruling elites and the developmental state depended, to a great extent, upon their capacity to buy the loyalty of subaltern classes and organised labour (Ayubi 1997). At the same time, it entailed the development and expansion of political alliances with both domestic and foreign private capital (Glasser 1995; Hibou 2006; Catusse 2008). Yet, state-provided welfare, such as minimum social security, health care, education, minimum wage and trade union rights, was considered a legitimate right and the revolts are to be seen as reactions against the violation of this social pact (Walton and Seddon 1994, 48, 179). Also, in Morocco, where the monarchy has always upheld a rhetorical commitment to economic liberalism, the state significantly expanded its economic role in the 1970s and was regarded by the general population as a legitimate and key actor in economic and social development. In that sense, the austerity protests were not only defensive expressions of social deprivation and economic self-interests, they were also political, as people demanded policy changes and seriously challenged political power, and more specifically the monarchy (Clément and Paul 1984; Walton and Seddon 1994). Moreover, the protests had a political impact, often reversing or slowing down austerity measures and creating an awareness of the political limits of structural adjustment (Seddon and Zeilig 2005).
These feelings of injustice continue to feed contemporary social movements and protests in Morocco. The diplômés chômeurs (unemployed graduates), for example, have developed a discourse defending public employment as their undisputed right. One of the main social consequences of the implementation of the SAP was the dramatic reduction in recruitment in the public sector. This new situation contrasted strongly with the 1960s and especially the 1970s when, owing to the favourable economic climate, the modernisation of industry and continuous urban migration, Morocco witnessed the emergence of a growing urban middle class, which was largely incorporated into an expanding public sector. Between 1970 and 1977, university enrolment tripled and the number of public servants grew at an annual rate of 5.5% on average (Cohen 2003). But structural adjustment ended this social pact. From the early 1990s onwards, unemployed graduates started to mobilise on a regular and structured basis and established the Moroccan National Association of Unemployed Graduates (ANDCM). Since then, the movement has evolved considerably and become a permanent and highly visible feature of the social protest landscape in Morocco to the present day (Bogaert and Emperador 2011).
With regard to the geography of protests, the disturbances of the 1980s were largely an urban phenomenon (Walton and Seddon 1994; Bayat 2002). First of all, developmental states display a clear urban bias (Walton 1998, 466). Public investments in education and the public sector went disproportionally to major cities and as a result many of the cities in Morocco and elsewhere in the region attracted many migrants from the countryside. When the developmental state eventually started to crumble, further urbanisation without economic growth rapidly put pressure on political stability and the social pact between the state and society (Davis 2006). The lack of investments in infrastructure, housing and transport was a grievance as important as the rising cost of living and structural unemployment that guided the ‘moral economy’ (Thompson 1971) of the urban low- and moderate-income classes (Walton and Seddon 1994, 194).1 Second, by the beginning of the 1980s, Moroccan organised labour had grown into an impressive force relatively independent from the ruling elites. In the events of Casablanca in 1981, the trade unions assumed a major role, proving capable of mobilising the working classes, the urban poor and the lower middle classes (Clément and Paul 1984). Of course, this does not mean that the protests that followed remained restricted to urban areas. In 1984, some of the most violent clashes took place in the Rif in the north of Morocco, a region with a historical track record of opposition and revolt. Moreover, by then the role of organised labour was already rather marginal. The monarchy had managed both to repress the unions and the major opposition parties and to incorporate them into a system of political consensus after the shake-up of 1981.
Because the centre of gravity of protest was situated within Morocco's major cities, they, and above all the metropolis of Casablanca, came to be seen as threats and spaces of ‘high risk’, especially the slum areas and the working-class neighbourhoods (Rachik 1995), just as in 1965, the riots of 1981 in Casablanca were severely repressed by police and army forces. Only this time, the use of physical violence was not the only answer the government had in store. After 1981, the marginalised urban areas – the slums, the informal housing quarters and the working-class areas – became the primary focus within a master plan for the restructuring and securitisation of Casablanca. Urban planning and administrative division were the two core components of this project of urban control (for a detailed discussion see Rachik 1995; Bogaert 2011). Later, following the disturbances of 1984 and 1990, other major cities were also subjected to similar restructurings. Moreover, since the accession to the throne of Mohamed VI in 1999, these urban restructurings have been complemented with more ‘contemporary’ neoliberal modalities of government to cope with the urban social crisis. New state-promoted social development and poverty alleviation initiatives were launched, implicating not so much a return to developmentalist policies, but rather the development of new techniques of political control and domination embedded in everyday economic mechanisms (Hibou 2006). With the gradual rollback of the social welfare mechanisms, the challenge for the young king lay in the reinvention of social policy to conform to global market requirements. A salient example was the national ‘Cities Without Slums’ programme, launched in 2004, which set a goal to eradicate all slums by 2015. Accordingly, in line with neoliberal principles, such an initiative entailed a redeployment of state power and the increasing privatisation of social policy (Hibou 1998; Catusse 2008; Bogaert 2011). Certain domains of public action were entrusted to private actors (e.g. through public–private partnerships), while the state opted for a more indirect form of control, management and support.
The repression, securitisation and social development initiatives all had their impact on social protest and entailed a qualitative transformation of collective action from the 1990s onwards (Vairel 2011). Moreover, King Mohamed VI repeatedly stressed the importance of good governance, human rights, economic development and citizen participation, which opened space for this transformation and the emergence of new actors (human rights movements, neighbourhood associations, women's movements, unemployed graduates etc.). It offered secular, leftists and Islamist activists, many of whom had spent years in prison, a way to be politically active outside party politics and militant trade unionism. Besides the unemployed graduates mentioned above, protests increased at the beginning of the 2000s with mobilisations around issues such as the Palestinian question, the invasion of Iraq, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission condemning the repression of the 1970s and the 1980s, and the position of women in family law (Ibid.). Gradually, the main focus of these protests shifted from international and highly symbolic issues to socio-economic grievances and domestic issues.2 In particular, since 2005, there has been a considerable increase in socio-economic protests. The immediate trigger for this increase was the sharp rise in prices of primary consumer goods in the region (Saif 2008).
In 2006, there was an attempt to coordinate some of these (mostly spontaneous) protests in a more structured way, which resulted in the ‘Mouvement contre la cherté de la vie’ (Movement Against the High Cost of Living), also known as the Movement Against the Rise of Prices and the Degradation of Public Services. As such, it was not just about price rises, as the protesters fought for the quality of public services and opposed their privatisation. The immediate trigger for this movement was spontaneous protests in the summer of 2006 against the raising of the tariffs by French multinationals Suez and Veolia, who are responsible for wastewater management and the distribution of water and electricity in Casablanca (Suez), Rabat, Tangiers and Tétouan (Veolia). One of the main actors behind the movement was the Moroccan Association of Human Rights (AMDH), an association founded at the end of the 1970s which has expanded rapidly during the last decade. AMDH brings together older leftist militants who were active in radical student movements, trade unions and leftist parties in the 1970s and 1980s, and younger activists, many of whom were/are active in the 20 February Movement. Today, the organisation has approximately 12,000 listed members and over 90 local sections spread over the country. They use the new political climate to mobilise around the notion of ‘rights’ (human rights, socio-economic rights etc.), trying to direct increasing feelings of social injustice.
The Movement Against the High Cost of Living also highlighted an ongoing change in the geography of protest. With the major cities under increasing control and with an ‘offensive urbanism’ (Naciri 1987) tackling the problems of urbanisation that became so prominent after structural adjustment, the centre of gravity shifted to the smaller villages and towns. In the heyday of the movement, between 2007 and 2009, there were more than 80 local committees or tansikiyat active around the country, involving not only AMDH but several other grassroots organisations (e.g. ATTAC Maroc, local neighbourhood associations etc.). Despite the existence of a national committee in Rabat, the movement largely remained a network of relatively autonomous sections, and most actions were spontaneous or taken at the initiative of local activists and associations of which some, such as in Bouarfa, were very active and quickly gained a lot of prestige among the local population and beyond. In 2011, the networks of local tansikiyat were a vital element of support – alongside the Islamists – for the 20 February Movement, enabling it to mobilise around the country.
A contemporary Maroc utile and Maroc inutile?
The increased attention given to larger cities produced a relationship between town and country that can be compared with and actually traced back to the policies of the French Protectorate. At its early stages, French colonialism in Morocco required massive investments in urban development and Resident-General Lyautey embarked upon an ambitious and experimental urban project to provide the country with the necessary infrastructure for its integration in the economic realm of the colonial system (see Abu Lughod 1980; Rachik 1995). In order to extract the main wealth of Morocco, comprising mainly minerals such as phosphate and agricultural products, colonial planning anticipated the creation of entirely new urban areas (villes nouvelles) and the instalment of industrial complexes (e.g. the port of Casablanca). In addition, the French developed road and railroad networks to improve the transportation of goods and create an ‘Atlantic axis’ between Kénitra and Safi with Casablanca as economic centre (Boujrouf 1996, 39). This part of Morocco is what Lyautey called le Maroc utile, which connected the newly developed coastal cities and the surrounding fertile Atlantic plains that extended into the country along the riverbeds with the colonial mother country (Abu Lughod 1980, 202). The prioritisation of the coastal region also undermined traditional cities such as Fez and Marrakech and ancient inland trade routes (King 1985). Maroc inutile represented those areas that were not of economic interest and actually resisted French colonialism until the ‘pacification’ ended in the 1930s.
One of the most important conclusions to be drawn from Abu Lughod's work is that the conditions for uneven urban development were the result of a political project. This was the case during the Protectorate and is still the case today. The Protectorate has left its definitive mark on the urban hierarchy of Morocco. While former capitals Fez and Marrakech had always been dominant before French rule, the development of colonial centres such as Rabat (as administrative capital) and Casablanca (as economic capital) irreversibly changed the hierarchy from the interior to the coastal cities (Abu Lughod 1980). This trend continues today with the dominant focus on metropolitan growth and the prioritisation of tourism, real estate development, offshore activities and megaprojects such as Tanger Med, Casablanca Marina and the Bouregreg project in Rabat (Zemni and Bogaert 2011). Besides the increasing inequality within cities as a result of these neoliberal development strategies, these strategies also increased the divide between town and country, between coastal cities and inland cities, and between different regions in Morocco, just as in the era of the Protectorate, the discrimination and deprivation of rural areas, mountain areas and smaller towns and villages continue (Boujrouf 1996; Naciri 1999). Today, Morocco's main highways and railroad network still bypass large, mainly rural and inland parts of Morocco. Consequently, Mohamed Naciri (1999, 34) notes that the distinction between a ‘useful Morocco’ (i.e. the urban centres of the coastal areas, the tourist attractions and large-scale industrial agriculture) and a ‘deprived’ or useless Morocco (i.e. the urban peripheries and slums, the rural poor and small-scale farming) still applies – distinction that would threaten Morocco's national cohesion if nothing radically changes within the next 10 years, he added almost prophetically in 1999.
The increase in protests in Morocco's peripheries cannot be considered separately from the policies that produce uneven development. Both the protests and the rising cost of daily living are an integral part of contemporary capitalist development. This social crisis is not about high prices as such, but about the contemporary form of global capitalism, the class politics and the relations of power and exploitation that produce food insecurity, poverty and inequality (Bush 2010). Consequently, the current protests should not be regarded as merely socio-economic or defensive, as they take very diverse forms and demonstrators have gone beyond the denouncement of price rises, expressing demands such as access to public jobs, better infrastructure (roads, houses etc.), more public support after natural disasters (earthquakes, floods) and the reversal of the privatisation of public services.
Many of these protests were spontaneous and temporary yet, in some cases, such as Bouarfa, they grew into enduring political struggles with widespread popular participation. In this small town of 25,000 inhabitants close to the border with Algeria, people collectively stopped paying their water bills in September 2006 to denounce rising prices.3 Besides this action of civil disobedience, local unemployed graduates also intensified their actions in that same year and camped in front of the provincial office for three months. The following year, activists of the local tansikiya, led by AMDH, managed to mobilise up to almost 10,000 people on 12 May 2007 for a march towards the National Potable Water Office (ONEP). After this demonstration of strength, representatives of the tansikiya and ONEP reached an agreement on the continuation of water distribution free of charge (Bennafla and Emperador 2009).
While Bouarfa's history is relatively peaceful, other cases evolved into violent clashes with security forces. In Sefrou, a town of 65,000 inhabitants located 20 kilometres from Fez, a sit-in organised by AMDH on 23 September 2007, followed by a march towards the prefecture, ended in violent clashes with police forces. The immediate trigger was a rise in the subsidised price of bread. Government officials took this warning seriously, as the disturbances led the king to assemble a committee, presided over by his Minister of the Interior, which immediately reversed the rise in the price of bread. Another well-known example is Sidi Ifni, a small coastal town of 20,000 inhabitants in the south near the border with the Western Sahara. Social tensions have been building up since May 2005 when approximately 7000 people marched on the municipal offices to denounce deteriorating public services and the lack of new investments. The initiative came from several grassroots associations. Given the success of this mobilisation, another march followed in August 2005. This time almost 14,000 people came out onto the streets, two-thirds of the town. Over the following years protests continued, involving unemployed graduates of ANDCM and militants from the local ATTAC section. Finally, in 2008 the situation ended in violent repression. In May, the local municipality had organised a lottery to assign eight available jobs in the local port, for which hundreds of people applied. Many suspected the contest was being rigged and some were still frustrated by the fact that earlier promises made in 2005 to invest in their town had not been kept. On 30 May, a few dozen ATTAC militants and unemployed graduates started a blockade of the port, preventing 89 trucks with more than 800 tonnes of fish from leaving the harbour. The blockade lasted for eight days and ended with severe police repression on 7 June, also known as ‘Black Saturday’. More than 6000 security forces intervened to end the blockade and crush any remaining form of resistance in the village (Bennafla and Emperador 2009).
As mentioned above, the struggles of Bourfa, Sefrou, Sidi Ifni and others are not just scattered and separated examples of local resistance. Nor are they merely the result of price rises or economic marginalisation. They should be situated within a wider process of capitalist uneven development and neoliberal reform. And, despite the fact that concrete struggles are often fragmented, shaped by the local context in which they are embedded and mostly opposing not so much the idea of neoliberalism as rather the negative outcomes it produces (Leitner et al. 2007), we should not underestimate the ways in which these local places might reveal themselves as important sites of political connection and change. First of all, the political reform process of the late 1990s (the Moroccan Alternance process), the increased attention given in the West to issues of democratisation and the role of civil society, and the new king, Mohamed VI, who willingly presented himself as a model reformer to the outside world, opened new spaces for contentious politics in smaller villages and towns and led to an explosion of local and grassroots associations (Bennafla and Emperador 2009). These are fundamental in the mobilisation of people and in making connections between different struggles in different parts of the country. The nationwide Movement Against the High Cost of Living and the role of an organisation such as AMDH are just two of the most obvious examples. Second, the success of some local struggles such as in Bouarfa and Sefrou have created political awareness and have fed growing feelings of injustice and a moral economy of a contemporary Maroc inutil, an image effectively used by many local activists (Ibid.; Hoffman 2013, 250).4 Figures such as Saddik Kabbouri, local secretary of the Moroccan trade union CDT in Bouarfa, member of AMDH and coordinator of the local tansikiya, have become key actors both locally and within wider activist networks. His arrest in May 2011 was not just a local issue but quickly became an issue within the whole activist community.
Back to Khouribga
In the wake of the events of 2011, the process of socio-economic protest continued and evolved. As mentioned above, there were protests in phosphate towns such as Khouribga, Boujniba, M'rirt and Safi. But these disturbances were not the only examples. In January 2012, riots broke out in Taza following protests by unemployed graduates. The situation escalated when inhabitants of the working-class neighbourhood Koucha joined the protests and clashed with police forces. Also in other towns around the country, unemployed graduates started to mobilise again on their own account after being overshadowed for a while by the 20 February Movement (Emperador 2011). Again, these examples are far from exhaustive. One other case is also revealing. In Imider, near a silver mine located approximately 30 kilometres from the town of Tinghir, people living in the vicinity protested against the Société Métallurgique d'Imider (SMI), a subsidiary of SNI, Morocco's largest private holding and controlled by the monarchy. In August 2011, they started a lengthy struggle occupying the well on Mount Alebban, which provides SMI with water for the exploitation of the silver mine, and denouncing the excessive use of water by the mining company which affected their own supplies. Local villagers cut off the water supply and camped on the hilltop to make sure that it was not turned back on. Simultaneously, they also denounced the lack of basic public infrastructures in the area (e.g. roads, hospitals and schools) and demanded a redistribution of the mineral wealth of the region (Granci 2012). Despite the fact that the struggle of the people of Imider had little or no direct connection with the 20 February Movement, it shows that a conceptual distinction between ‘socio-economic’ and ‘political’ protest is built on shaky ground. The struggle in Imider was not merely about the scarcity of water, but about public services, the question of ownership over national resources and the redistribution of wealth; in other words, fundamental political questions.
Yet, the most telling example were the protests and the riots that occurred between February and August 2011 in the mining province of Khouribga and other sites, such as Safi, connected to the phosphate industry. While originally part of ‘useful Morocco’, the moral economy of the protesters also finds its origins in the decline of the social pact of the pre-neoliberal era. Khouribga, a town of approximately 172,000 inhabitants, would have never existed without OCP. The company was the driving force for the urbanisation of the phosphate region. Founded in 1920, OCP started to build the mining town of Khouribga from scratch in 1924 as an administrative centre. From the very beginning, during the French Protectorate, workers were imported from other regions, mainly the Souss region, and housed by OCP itself. In 1952, Khouribga had the third largest concentration of workers after cities such as Casablanca and Safi. Back then, the city was divided into two parts, the OCP village on one side of the railway, and the rest of the town on the other side, populated by merchants and other people attracted by the increasing activity in the mining town (Bleuchot 1969). After Morocco's independence, OCP continued to have a great impact on Khouribga and the surrounding area. Not only was it the main employer, it also continued to provide housing, education and basic infrastructure such as water and electricity. The workers at the phosphate company have enjoyed particular social benefits to the present day that could not be matched by other employers. In sum, OCP was practically a state within a state. Working for OCP was a privilege that often went from father to son. However, economic liberalisation and structural adjustment caused OCP to cut back on its role as ‘city-maker’ and regional developer. In particular, since the beginning of the 2000s, OCP has outsourced more and more of its other tasks to either subcontractors or the municipality (interview with OCP employee, 11 January 2012, Casablanca). This, together with increasing technological innovation, has made it possible for OCP to reduce its workforce over the years from 40,000 to fewer than 20,000 today (interview with the chief economist of OCP, 12 January 2012, Casablanca).
Despite this disengagement, the company remains practically the only solution for the youth of Khouribga and its surrounding areas. In particular, since the crisis in the Eurozone, and more particularly Italy, migration has become less and less of an option.5 In the eyes of many people, OCP remains the sole public authority in their region. And frustration only increases when people see and hear about the company's increasing profits due to a considerable rise in the price of phosphate on the international market in the mid 2000s. We can draw the comparison with the moral economy of the unemployed graduates. In the same way that the latter call into existence a certain image of the state – a state which owes them a specific social contract – and integrate this image in the legitimation of their ‘right to a public job’ (Bogaert and Emperador 2011), the protesters in the mining region call upon a certain image of OCP and connect this with their ‘right to work for OCP’. For the youth of Khouribga, OCP has a ‘moral debt’ towards them (interview with an activist blogger originally from Khouribga who was involved in the talks between OCP and the protesters, 7 January 2012, Casablanca). Or, to put it in the words of the OCP Director of Environment and Social Responsibility, Taha Balafrej, ‘OCP has become the victim of [protesters’] expectations.' When I asked him whether he thought it was feasible for a company of fewer than 20,000 employees to integrate 5800 new recruits at once (see below), he answered: ‘well, you see, it's absurd. Freedom permits people even to support absurdity’ (La liberté permet même de défendre l'absurdité). With this last sentence he was giving his own opinion on the intersection between what happened in Khouribga, the 20 February Movement and the alleged progress made since then with the reform initiatives undertaken by Mohamed VI (interview, 12 January 2012, Casablanca).
The disturbances of 2011 clearly captured the attention of the authorities. In an attempt to calm the situation, OCP launched an impressive investment programme, OCP Skills, within weeks after the first violent confrontations. With this programme OCP committed itself to hiring 5800 new recruits within the next year. On its website, the company states that it will favour ‘qualified candidates related to OCP, such as children of retirees and people living in the vicinity of the Group's production sites’.6 A second pillar of the programme provides employment training for another 15,000 young people in order to ‘develop the employability of candidates’.7 A third pillar of the project includes the stimulation and sponsoring of entrepreneurial projects in the region in cooperation with private credit institutions, such as the bank Crédit Agricole. During a first phase, between September 2011 and March 2012, OCP Skills supported 52 projects in various sectors such as carpentry, construction, tiling etc.8 The success of OCP Skills was manifest. Within weeks, approximately 90,000 people applied, of whom more than 35,000 were from Khouribga. However, this was a fragile success, given that the riots of July in Khouribga were caused by disappointed youth following rumours of clientelism and favouritism within the programme.
Although OCP Skills has never been officially presented as a direct answer to the demands of the protesters, it is clear that the programme would never have been launched in its current form and at its current pace if the protests hadn't occurred. As one OCP employee involved directly in the programme told us: ‘because of the relation between OCP and the cities in which we are active, we have created certain expectations. … Today, the events of March [2011]’, which he later called the ‘little revolution’, ‘made us more aware of the fact that we have to anticipate [potential disturbances]’ (interview, 11 January 2012, Casablanca). Two points explain why there were good reasons to anticipate possible future disturbances. First, what was threatening about the disturbances in this particular region was maybe not so much the organisational capacities of the protesters, the political ideas they began to spread or the political alliances they built – after all, the protests were largely spontaneous – but rather their capacity to slow down or even completely cut off the production and transport of phosphates, an industry which is absolutely vital to the Moroccan economy (for a similar argument see Mitchell 2009, 403). Second, if such spontaneous and particularistic struggles eventually grow into a more general and widespread struggle, such as in the phosphate region of Gafsa (Tunisia), they might have a radical effect beyond anybody's imagination (Ayeb 2011).
Still, at first sight, the protests in Khouribga seem to confirm the image of a clear distinction between socio-economic and civil democratic protests. It is striking that while these months of protests were clearly the product of a changing social climate that began with the mass protests on 20 February and the Arab uprisings more generally, the young unemployed protesters involved in the occupation and the blockades explicitly distanced themselves from the political goals of the 20 February Movement. ‘In other countries they revolt for freedom, here we revolt for work,’ I was told by one of them (interview, 10 January 2012, Boujniba). The distinction between political and socio-economic protests seems to be produced by the demonstrations themselves, the techniques of demonstration (i.e. slogans, blockades, the choice of location etc.) and their effects (confrontation with the police, representation in the media etc.) (Barry 1999). Even in a city such as Safi, where the 20 February Movement was particularly strong, organised unemployed graduates were either reluctant to participate in the weekly demonstrations of the movement or, if they did, they shouted their own slogans. As a local member of ATTAC stated: ‘They [the unemployed] didn't show solidarity with the movement because they thought that otherwise they would have less chance of getting hired’ (interview, 20 February 2012, Safi).
This is a concern you hear among many local activists of the 20 February Movement. During the heyday of the movement they did not succeed, either in Khouribga or in many other places, in actively involving large parts of the working classes, and the rural and the urban poor as a group, despite the fact that local and particularistic class struggles continued and coincided. That is why many of them in smaller towns, such as in Khénifra, decided to leave the more general political demands (e.g. a new constitution) and focus on concrete socio-economic demands. ‘Because to many people who cannot read or write, the constitution is just hocus-pocus’ (interview with a member of AMDH, 4 September 2011, Khénifra). Here, an example is presented of how activists of 20 February make a distinction between different kinds of protests while at the same time trying to bridge them. Nevertheless, Abdelrahman pinpoints that it is actually capitalist uneven development itself that ‘provides the structural conditions which encourage and deepen such a binary relationship’ (Abdelrahman 2012, 618). Encapsulated within individual units of production, the impact of large companies on local contexts and the particular relations between capital and labour, class struggles in capitalism almost always tend to be local and particularistic (620). Yet, in an authoritarian or absolutist state – as Luxemburg described Russia in 1906 – every form of expression of the working class, ‘every economic struggle will become a political one’ (Luxemburg 2005 [1906], 57). Likewise, a democratic struggle cannot be separated from the underlying socio-economic dimension, as the authoritarian shape of Arab states is instrumental in their politics of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2003). This account has shown that local struggles are not just about economic self-interest, but about fundamental political issues related to economic marginalisation, redistribution of wealth and public services. In the case of Khouribga, the immediate launch of OCP Skills may have put the explosive situation under control (for now). At the same time, the programme itself indicates the very political impact of the disturbances of 2011. It was a deliberate attempt by the Moroccan authorities to prevent Khouribga from becoming a site of political connection and evolving into something much bigger, much more radical.
Conclusion
20 February 2011 was a key moment in the history of Moroccan protest. However, any attempt to understand the wider impact of social protest in Morocco since 2011 should not underestimate the history of the numerous local and particularistic struggles in the peripheries of the Kingdom. Moreover, while the 20 February Movement may seem in decline, the daily struggle in Morocco's small towns and villages continues. The riots in Khouribga, and other seemingly isolated cases of socio-economic protest, were not just cases of ‘militant particularism’, i.e. ‘bounded politics of place’, as if they were somehow disconnected from the same wider political-economic tensions, social conditions and interconnections that produce both socio-economic and civil democratic struggles (Featherstone 2005). Neither were they simple side-effects or offshoots of a Moroccan version of the ‘Arab Spring’, represented by a waging of battle between the 20 February Movement and the monarchy. On the contrary, they are integral to a larger historical process that has been developing for years, even decades. 20 February was not just the next domino. Like all the other struggles in the region, it was grounded – but not isolated – in its own history. A history in which various forms of civil democratic struggle and socio-economic struggle ‘run through one another, run side by side, cross one another, flow in and over one another’ as a ceaseless movement full of continuities and disruptions (Luxemburg 2005 [1906], 46).
I have discussed both the continuity and transformation of social protests and situated them within a context of capitalist uneven development. Since the early 1980s, neoliberal reform has been confronted with opposition and resistance. Nevertheless, the urban riots and mass demonstrations of the 1980s and the responses they provoked lay at the basis of both a shift in the geography of protest and a qualitative transformation. First of all, government responses including the securitisation of major cities, social reform, limited political liberalisation and the prioritisation of Morocco's coastal areas and urban economy (the contemporary Maroc utile) have contributed to a gradual shift in the geographic centre of gravity of social protests. The marginalisation of economically less interesting regions, the rural hinterlands, mountain areas and the smaller towns, combined with the gradual and continuous retreat of public authorities from the provision of services and the redistribution of collective welfare, continue to mobilise people in small villages and towns on a daily basis. Second, (limited) political reform initiatives and discursive references to democratisation and the importance of civil society which have characterised the transformation of Morocco's authoritarian political system since the mid 1990s have opened new spaces for contestation and caused an explosion of local and grassroots associations. This has also provided opportunities to activists to become active outside the realm of corrupted party politics and co-opted trade unions. New networks have been built over the years (e.g. AMDH, the tansikiyat and the Movement Against the High Cost of Living) which reveal how local places might become important sites of connection and change in the coming years. The importance of certain local tansikiyat – alongside the Islamists of Adl Wal Ihsane – in the mobilisation of people during the heyday of the 20 February Movement serve as an important indicator.
A final point as to why it is necessary to consider the broader history and geography of social protests in Morocco is, as Luxemburg also pointed out, that moments of apparent stagnation do not necessarily mean that national movements or struggles have failed. After all, we should not underestimate the ‘most precious, because lasting, thing in the rapid ebb and flow of the wave’, namely its ‘mental sediment’ (Luxemburg 2005 [1906], 38), left behind by the ‘living political school’ of day-to-day struggle (34). Within a historical perspective of continuous struggle, particular socio-economic struggles can grow into more general, political ones, and vice versa, the temporary unity of protests can break up again and scatter in the form of individual, local struggles (Ibid.). This latter point does not necessarily have to be considered a setback or even a decay, only a logical evolution in a long-term (revolutionary) process. As such, the purpose was not to predict the next possible outburst of revolutionary struggle in Morocco, but to understand the potential power embedded in the dispersed yet interconnected geography of social protest. Because if Luxemburg's analysis showed one thing, it is that scattered and economic struggle can grow into a single force without the existence of a unified political movement beforehand (Mitchell 2009, 405).